


Even Grass Maidens

by Thelxiope



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F, a story in which nothing happens, just for kicks (because like the title spells out: Sanvers is endgame)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-15
Updated: 2019-09-15
Packaged: 2020-10-18 23:08:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20647217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thelxiope/pseuds/Thelxiope
Summary: Alex finds herself stuck in time, back in what appears to be the late 1800's. By her own estimate she's been here at least since the end of season 3.





	Even Grass Maidens

**Author's Note:**

> Many liberties were taken with all sources of material.

_I am going to kill Sara Lance._

She has this thought every day --for the last 453 days, and counting-- when endlessly pumping water, tripping over these effing long prairie skirts, stepping in horse shit, and scrubbing her supersuit clean against a washboard in the creek. After the first frost she seriously considers carving this mantra in the back of the outhouse door with her bowie knife just to lessen the insult of having to go outside in the dark and frigid Minnesota mornings.

><><

After the World Killers, before J'onn turned over the DEO directorship, Alex gets a ping from the Legends, specifically from Sara (“Hey Special Agent Doctor Dr. Danvers, I have a proposition 4U.”) acknowledging that she was glad everything turned out ok, for the most part, as things only can for these heroes, and if she needed to get away, the Legends were thinking of heading to Aruba and she was welcome to join, no strings attached, no hookup expected (“ha ha”), in fact Sara finally had a girlfriend she was feeling pretty serious about.

So on this early July afternoon, a day with perfect weather, when the residents of National City, having escaped the grip of fear and destruction, are coming together to rebuild and renew, Alex reads through her texts as she pokes at her lunch and takes a moment to consider --spending some time away from the city for a while, from Kara and Lena, from Sam and Ruby, the DEO without Winn especially before she married it, and of course the ever present heartache and specter of you-know-who-- and says yes.

The following evening Alex uses Kara's widget to portal to Earth-1 and join up with the Waverider, but of course as usual things don’t go as planned. She is on the bridge for about eight whole minutes when the alarms sound, Sara starts shouting, and things well outside her purview erupt into chaos. Before she can react there is a blinding flash and the heady sensation of falling, then all the air knocked out of her and she is outside, face-planted on the ground. Her fingers curl around long grass as she gasps for breath and tries to lift her head. There is the blush of daylight and a white wooden building nearby, and the smell of melting plastic, then darkness.

><><

Some kids (Benjamin and Jennifer) are poking her with a stick. She hears a noise, like a mournful croaking, that frightens her although she is the source of it, and alarms the kids even further and they run off. Then two old men have her on a litter and she's levitating fitfully though the air. She hears the scrape and jangle of horses’ tack, and she gets a whiff of them too. Maybe it’s the old men.

><><

When Alex wakes up she's in dimly lit quarters that smell like tobacco and cedar and something incongruously antiseptic. It’s daytime, but she doesn’t know if it’s morning or afternoon and she doesn’t know if it’s the same day that it was before. She squints and blinks as her eyes adjust. She calls for Sara or Kara, but instead Dr. Hiram Baker, his once red hair thinning, looking sun-dried but dapper in his bolo tie, introduces himself and wonders who she is and how she got there.

She’s stumped for a backstory, as the doctor patiently waits and watches, unsure how she can explain _where_ she is from, if she doesn’t even know _when_ she is now. Later she will make up a tale of international travel, strange customs and hair styles, that may or may not include fisticuffs with a roving band of thieves as she journeys home, but without a better understanding of her current predicament she decides it’s best if she gives the appearance of having only fallen victim to a slight case of amnesia. And with that thought she remembers to evaluate herself for a traumatic brain injury.

The doctor helps. He’s surprised when she asks all the right questions and confused when her knowledge surpasses his own. Biting back her worry and annoyance, she understands that the closest she’s going to get to running a computerized tomography scan on herself is to shine a rusty lantern in her eyes in front of a mirror.

There's murmuring outside the door about the odd looking woman in the odd looking union suit who the children found behind the schoolhouse. Alex had left her gun with her travel bag on the Waverider but instinctively checks for the weapon at her hip (still not there) but finds her magnets in a pouch on the other, and after a second pat down, also her phone.

A woman (Mrs. Ingalls), soft-spoken and maternal, who cooks at the restaurant in town, arrives with some bean soup and biscuits. Next to appear behind her is a blonde (the widowed Mrs. Nellie Dalton) about the same age as Alex, her arms piled up with layers of garments presumably for her to change into --all those layers, all just one outfit-- having been alerted to Alex’s state of undress by her children who were the ones who found her. The doc is happy to take them, whilst admonishing her curiosity, as Alex turns away to hide a smirk because the woman simply cannot keep herself from staring, her eyes huge like saucers.

The doctor shares this small building with the post office and up on the second story there are rooms to let and a vacancy, so Doc grants her one for the time being. He helps her up and they walk outside. Holding the pile of clothes she walks to the front of the building and looks down the road at the rest of the town, such as it is, shading her eyes from the sunlight, relieved that her head feels none the worse for its glare. The doc, fretful about this woman standing outside underdressed and unabashed, ushers her around to the rear and up a narrow knotty pine staircase to the room on the left. He fetches a bucket of water for her and then finally she is alone.

Knowing full well the futility of her actions, but unable to keep from trying, Alex takes out her phone and checks for a signal before sitting heavily down upon the worst futon ever. She scans the room, lit by a single square window high on the wall –-simple table, straight-backed chair, bedding rustic but clean, basin and pitcher, the leftover food and clothes they’d carried up. Surely her hosts would be appalled if she were to start punching and kicking the walls so she centers herself and sets her mind to problem-solving this current situation.

Step one is to establish communications, try to contact the Legends. Besides mailing a letter to the future from the post office downstairs, she figures she could cause a disruption, in hopes that the presence of a cell phone here, or the existence of the nanotech in her suit, will trip Gideon's sensors --assuming they still worked, that they were still out there somewhere, that the blast that sent her here had spared the ship. So she does this, every other day, until the charge runs out: look at her screen for 60 seconds to scroll through her old messages and photos --Kara, her mom, J'onn, the superfriends, and sometimes Maggie. (Then later, almost exclusively, Maggie.) She tries to find a way to use the power cells in her suit to extend the life of her phone a little longer but she fails.

Step two is recon and step three is assimilation. She could head west, make a treacherous journey out to the coast to what in some 130 odd years might be the National City she knew, but it is probably better to stay put; she will venture no farther than a few hours walk away from her landing spot so if the Legends can trace her she will still be here, at the last known whereabouts, last known whenabouts: Walnut Grove, 1882. She stands and looks back at the pile of garments on the bed and scowls. There is no way in hell she is wearing that bonnet.

><><

Ok, so, she’s totally wearing the bonnet. Unfortunately it’s tightly woven linen that will not be at all useful for wiping up the blood that is going to collect around the dead body of Sara Lance, but she keeps this thought to herself as she sweetly takes the elbow that Doc offers her as they set off on a stroll through town to make introductions. She considered playing the invalid and staying shuttered away, but she suspects that she has become the subject of rumor and speculation and best to put all that to rest, as her rescue, its probability yet to be determined, could be days away. They cross the small bridge over the creek, pass the sawmill, the general store, the hotel, until finally they stop at the schoolhouse, the road though town continues winding off to the right on to who knows where.

It seems hasty, this formal introduction with the townsfolk convened all together, but she’s got nowhere to go at the moment and can’t explain where she’s from so she may as well take up the mantle as the newest resident in town. They don’t get new faces here very often, maybe once a month, and when it’s a Monday evening like this one, they are almost always warm and welcoming. She appears to them to be out of place and beleaguered (because she is) so they take pity on her and show her kindness and generosity. The doc announces that she’ll be his assistant having demonstrated knowledge of medicine and physiology so she must have had some training as a nurse. Without much else to do, it’s a position she gladly accepts. The doc reminds her a little of J’onn, skeptical yet paternal, and she can work with that.

The next morning she goes to the general store for some supplies Doc has ordered to stock the surgery. She greets the owner of the mercantile (Mr. Nels Oleson) who is happy to see her looking refreshed, as he had helped the doctor move her inside after his grandchildren found her, and there is no need for her to be embarrassed he’s just glad that she’s all right. His wife is normally there too, but she’s been away visiting relatives.

As he shows her a selection of new toothbrushes (pig hair bristle!) he suggests that she stop in across the way at Nellie’s Restaurant and Hotel, owned and managed by his daughter (the previously met) since the untimely passing of her husband. As he’s speaking and displaying his wares, her eye catches on the glint of an impressive fixed handled knife for sale. It might not be a bad idea to have a weapon in an unknown place. This calm and kindly Mr. Oleson displays an understanding which surprises her, but she’s glad for his misinterpretation of her plight when he lets her take it on loan until she feels safe in the town, a woman alone and all that, or finds a way home. She thanks him and bends to lift the hem of her long skirt and slides the sheathed knife into the high boots she’s continued to wear. He has seen a lot of things before, but he’s never seen that, and no one in the town has yet seen her smile as brightly as she is smiling when she stands back up.

><><

She shifts the parcel of goods in her arms and waits for a wagon to pass and the dust from the road to settle before stepping down off the landing and venturing over to the two-story cream-colored building on the other side of the clearing. She hears a commotion out back and goes to investigate, where she finds Mrs. Dalton, the Nellie of Nellie’s, with her blouse removed, in a cloud of dust, beating the crap out of a rug, nearly busting out of her corset and breathing heavily; a light veneer of perspiration makes her shimmer through the sunlit particles. This time it’s Alex who finds herself staring and thinks maybe she did take a blow to the head after all. Nellie looks up and sees her, momentarily frozen in shock before stepping demurely behind the hanging rug, but not dropping her gaze as though expecting Alex to say or do something. Before she can there is a screech and collective shouting coming from the schoolyard.

Alex spins into action, as you know she would, lifting her skirt (again) and running towards the commotion. She pulls up as she reaches the gaggle of children surrounding the well next to the school, and they all hush in unison upon her arrival. One of them points at the well and she peers over the side, dreading the worst, but it turns out they were all just startled and worried when the rope had snapped and the bucket dropped to the bottom. She could just barely make it out bobbing on the surface far below. Someone --their teacher (Mrs. Wilder the younger), joined by a few other adults, including Nellie, jogging up with everything tucked back in-- thinks one of them could go get a hay hook from Hansen's to try to nab the handle, but Alex has a better idea. She reaches inside the waistband of her skirt to the pouch on her suit underneath, pulls out and pulls on her gloves and magnets, then leans over the edge, slapping one on the side of the well to activate it, and holds her arm out as the metal rings zip the bucket right back up into her hand. Where once the kids' faces were immobile with dull fear and mouth-breathing, there is now cheering and a lot of oooh-ing and ahhh-ing, and clamoring to see her gadgets. And this is how Miss Danvers gets the job of teacher’s helper, explaining the magnets and gravity and the solar system and geometry and states of matter and the visible spectrum to farm kids.

><><

Days turn into weeks, weeks into months. She finds a routine among these new friends and neighbors and the slow stillness that envelops their lives, learning (dance a reel, play the spoons) and living (cooking, planting, preserving). She even continues to workout by filling a large gunny sack with cotton feed bags she swiped from the mercantile and dry sandy soil, the kind which she now knows is good for growing root vegetables. A length of rope hoists and secures the makeshift heavy bag on a thick branch of a walnut tree in the woods behind the mill. She punches to keep in shape. She punches to stay sane. She punches until she can no longer feel her heartbreak. She punches. She spins and she kicks. And she waits and she hopes.

><><

When the weather gets cooler, Doc suggests she takes a room at the hotel. Alex is happy to do so, and that first night there she enjoys the step up in amenities and the warmth of her own stove, and in the many days to follow she spends time in the kitchens and helps out where she can to cover her room and board if the stipend she gets from her other jobs cannot.

Living at the hotel brings her closer to Nellie, with whom she’s developing a cautious friendship. It seems an unlikely pairing at first, the widow and the strange spinster from somewhere else, particularly to the folks who have known Nellie all her life, but like Percival (Nellie’s husband, RIP) Alex seems to be a good influence on the once selfish and spoiled girl from the mercantile. Nels approves and finds reasons to push them together. Mrs. Oleson (Nellie’s mother, loud and formidable in her tightly buttoned collars and fashion-forward bustle) does not. She is vocal in her disapproval of Alex and always looking at her askance, making comments about her appearance, her mannerisms, her being too smart, and her pointed disinterest in all of the bachelors, of any age, in town.

To Alex’s surprise, early on in their friendship Nellie intervenes one afternoon when she’s had enough of her mother’s meddling and bigotry, and in this defense inadvertently dissolves the mystery of Alex’s origin. (“Just leave her alone, Mother! She knows better than you. She’s… FROM FRANCE!”) They have a good laugh about it when her mother leaves; of course she admits that she isn’t really from France and Nellie waves her off, preferring to believe her own story.

Not long after, she also tells her the truth about Maggie --that where she’s from it’s ok for two women to get married and that they had planned to do so, although Alex admitted that perhaps she was a little impulsive with her proposal (there had been a war after all) and second-guessing and wedding jitters made her blow the whole relationship up-- and how she thinks about her every day, and wishes things could be different. She shows the phone, before it dies for good, and the photos on it to Nellie, who’s not as astonished or awestruck or mystified as she should be by any of it, but Alex doesn’t quite notice, because they end up talking late into the evening about how to carry on in the world when you’ve lost your true love.

><><

That was well over a year ago. These days, the reality that her past is more than a hundred and thirty years in the future has truly settled in. She reaches out and quietly uncoils one of Nellie’s curls as the woman sleeps on the pillow beside her. So, yeah, that happened. Curiosity and loneliness finally brought them together and there was comfort in staying. Their liaison has lessened the frequency of her murder mantra, and helps to pass the time, but has done nothing to curb the pain of her loss. It’s not love, not like that. It’s convenient, and although she is fond of Nellie, she's never intended on staying and that has been clear from the start. Nellie knows; if she could someday reunite with Percival, she would do the same.

><><

On the morning when the Legends finally do arrive, they have parked the Waverider a good ten miles past the outskirts of the town, the inhabitants of which, as always, view the strangers with a mixture of howdy and curiosity. Alex hears about their arrival only moments before she sees them disembarking from a wagon and approaching the front of the hotel on foot. She glances once over at Nellie before standing abruptly, throwing her sewing down on the porch and marching out to greet them. (“How was Aruba, assholes?”) Sara stops short, on guard, as it takes her a half second to recognize Alex --dressed as she is in calico, her hair grown longer, unruly and ever slipping from the bun she tries to keep it in, and her face covered with freckles (she really dislikes wearing the bonnet)-- then breaks into a wide, relieved smile.

After two years of envisioning her murder, in this instant at least, Alex decides to let Sara Lance live, and extends a tepid welcome to Nate and the new guy (John Constantine) too. She spends a long day preparing for her departure, settling her affairs and making farewells, during which time the Legends make themselves scarce and stay out of her way. She thinks they’re acting shifty, but she can’t figure out why, and won’t take the time to find out when there are more important conversations she needs to have right now.

Her final hour she spends with Nellie, in her room at the hotel as the sun sets and shadows lengthen, sitting so close together, reminiscing, lingering. Nellie’s not heartbroken or devastated. Alex isn’t forlorn or remorseful. They’re friends and they’ll stay that way. Alex is so sure that Gideon will have a way for her to send messages back, letters mailed from the future, from “France,” for Nellie, the kids, and the doc, that she promises to do so.

By lantern light she departs, caresses those curls one last time, kisses her dry cheeks goodbye, and smiles at Nellie’s final words of advice. (“Be happy. Find Maggie.”) As she climbs into the wagon, Sara smirks and raises an eyebrow at her, but Alex shuts her up with a pointed glare. She looks back once to wave as they drive away, but it’s already getting too dark to see, and they all sit uncomfortably mute for a few miles while the horse-drawn wagon clatters apace, the road before them unnaturally illuminated by a spotlight from the 21st century. Alex, well accustomed to this mode of travel and exhausted from the emotions of the day, nods off against Nate’s shoulder, for what seems like mere minutes, but when she rouses they are approaching the edge of a large clearing, the sky above them wide open and filled with stars.

Alex stretches, the proximity of the return to her own time and place reinvigorating her, and admits with a modicum of humility that she is, in fact, so happy and thankful to see them, and that living in the 1880’s has been no picnic, when she catches odd glances passed between them.

“Nineteen,” says Sara, and Alex squints back at her not comprehending. “It’s the nineteen eighties, 1984 to be exact.”

Before she can respond, Constantine stands up in the back of the wagon and raises his arms and repeats an incantation. The air around them begins to shimmer like a wall of black water and Nate pulls forward through the illusion and into the clearing. Alex is frozen, incredulous and more than a little confused when the sky isn’t as dark as it was and the lights of airplanes blink far above them and the rumble of trucks on a highway in the distance replace the sounds of crickets and wood frogs that they could hear seconds before. They all hop down from the wagon when the time ship uncloaks in front of them. Sara wraps her arm around Alex’s shoulders, gingerly to be sure, and with assurances that she will explain what she can, accompanies her through the airlock.

><><

She thinks it all feels like bad exposition as she sits in the captain’s office, having firmly declined a visit to the medical bay, feet up and drink in hand, comically out of keeping with the dress she is still wearing, listening to Sara’s account of the malfunction that sent her away. She drops her feet to the floor, one might even call it stomping, now that she understands why her cellphone strategy didn’t work and why it took them so long to find her, and presses them to get to the part about what’s causing the time warp. Which it isn’t, not so much. Constantine describes an anomaly caused by a demon, a madness demon, which created the town out of time where everyone believed it was the 1800s. Gideon has been able to determine that it has been going on for twenty years and that the only way to release the people from the anomaly is to destroy the town.

Alex’s outrage is assuaged by the arrival of Director Sharpe from the Time Bureau (also Sara’s girlfriend, noted) and her plan to keep everyone safe and sane by allowing them all to believe that they were actors in a long running television show that, for it’s grand finale, will blow up the town to keep it from evil railroad tycoons or some such nonsense. Her assistant pulls out a device, that they call a memory flasher, and explains in a roundabout and mostly ineffectual way how it is supposed to work. He even has the audacity to suggest that they flash Alex, who obviously would never do anything as stupid as fuck around with her own memories; if she’s going to go home and look and feel a couple years older than she was the day before, so be it. (Plus she needs to remember her killer recipe for apple brown betty, and not to accept any future invitations from Sara.)

Her patience is wearing thin and she’s ready to go home, but Constantine is lecturing about the demon, an insidious species that can keep everything looking normal on the surface, until people start experiencing these anomalies and inconsistencies, then sensing the evil lurking underneath, everything starts to unspool, resulting in the madness on which it feeds. Sara adds that they’ve been trying to keep timelines consistent and histories in place but these demons are running amok, messing up all kinds of stuff, and that the one they’ve detected on Earth-38 is especially bad. This recaptures her attention and concern. Sara explains why the name of the demon sounds so familiar to her ("Buffy. Season 5. Not exactly like on the show, but close.”) and how they haven’t yet found a way to stop them. Alex promises to get the superfriends on the case after she gets back.

><><

She wakes up in her own bed, her own giant bed, with its soft fresh sheets, and is so, so, freaking happy to be home. Last night she spent 40 minutes in the shower, luxuriating in the hot running water --and conditioning her hair, which she realized she needed to cut, and although she didn’t quite get it right would have to do-- then ordered hot pizza and opened a bottle of scotch, consumed a third of both, and went to bed. Now, well rested and restored she makes her plans for the day.

Step one is to call Kara to tell her all about this crazy adventure over a brunch of all her favorites.

Step two is to check in at the DEO and with J'onn to make sure everything is as she left it (yesterday), and see what she can find out about this queller demon stuff.

Step three, most importantly, is to call Maggie. She beams at the thought, wrapping her arms around herself and squeezing to be sure she isn’t dreaming. She'd missed her so much --two years for her, but only several months for Maggie-- that she couldn't even get a clear handle on how she'd let things spiral so far out of control, how she'd behaved so much not like herself. But, she'll face that later, for now she is scared, terrified even, of making that call, but she'd jumped in before and she can do it again. Even if Maggie’s in Gotham or out of the country…

She is startled out of her thoughts by a sudden loud knock at her door.

She pads across her apartment and checks the peephole to see a woman with brown hair standing there, but not at all the woman she is always hoping it will be. The stranger looks like she’s wearing a Time Bureau suit, but it could just be ugly. She opens the door, somewhat annoyed, vaguely curious, (“Did Sharpe send you?”) but the woman silently shakes her head back and forth. Alex tenses, her eyes dart over to the key stand where her weapon should be, but it’s not there. When she looks back at the fake time agent, it’s too late; she has already raised up a memory flasher and Alex has no time to blink.

><><

The demon's face splits into a hideous pointy-toothed grin as she takes a step forward and pushes the dazed Agent Danvers two steps back into her apartment before pulling the door shut and walking away.


End file.
